Where's the Photo Field?

[Jason Dunn]

There are two technologies starting to come together that made me wonder why Outlook doesn't have a field for a contact photo. We have the proliferation of digital cameras (both stand alone and integrated into phones and devices) and PDA/Smartphones that sync with Outlook. On the Pocket PC Phone Edition devices we have third-party software that will bring up a picture, but it needs to be a specific size and format and as far as I know it's not tightly integrated with Outlook. I know that in Outlook you can paste an image into the notes field, but if memory serves that last time I tried that the result was very ugly on the Pocket PC.<br /><br />What we need is an Outlook field for a photo of the contact. It should have a corresponding field on the Pocket PC, and in both locations it should be integrated cleanly into the user interface. I'm obviously not the first person to think of this, so I have to wonder why Microsoft hasn't added this feature to Outlook yet. Poor results from a focus group? Perhaps people don't want to share photos of themselves with others? Does anyone beta testing the next-gen Outlook if Microsoft finally added this in?<br /><br />I also can't figure out why Outlook email messages don't have a hotkey/button/menu option for "Insert V-Card". I know you can drag/drop from your contacts folder, or attach one to every message by default, but wouldn't a button be nice? Or is there a better way that I don't know about?<br /><br /><b>UPDATE:</b> Look at that! Even before I post this thought, I found a partial answer. It <a href="http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ol11.htm">seems that Outlook 11</a> will have a "show picture in contact form" option. Now the question is, will this be supported in the next Pocket PC OS... :?

[egads]

I'd kill just to have Outlook have some basic features every other email program I've ever used. I'd kill to be able to select some text in the orginal message, hit reply, and only the text I've selected shows up in the reply window. Outlook also puts your .sig at the top of the message, not at the bottom where it belongs. And last but not least, I want the actuall email address to show up in the "To:' field, not the contacts name. Some of my contacts have several email addresses and unless you right-click on the name and do a properties, you don't know which email address your using. I could go on forever of all the little things that bug me about Outlook. MS needs to take a look at Eudora and Pegasus and see all of the nice little features they have add a few of those features that will not overly bloat Outlook.

Where do you think these pictures will be stored ? My PST file is already 200Meg. By looking that the Outlook link you point to I will be needing more memory and a bigger harddrive for the new Office :)

[JonnoB]

With the phone edition, it would be natural to have the photo show up along with the name based on CallerID look up as well. I know there is an app that already does this, but to have it integrated across the OS to the desktop would be ideal.

[Philip Colmer]

Perhaps people don't want to share photos of themselves with others?

When I was designing the Intranet for the company I'm at, I added a section that would show who had joined in the last three months, along with their photos. After all, it is useful to put a name to a face. The photos were also used in the company telephone database.

You would not believe the amount of hassle I got when I went around trying to take photos of staff! They really hated it and, in the end, I gave it up as a bad job.

Shame, really.

--Philip

[MultiMatt]

Jonathan,
What is the name of that App you are referring to?

Matt

[Philip Colmer]

I'd kill just to have Outlook have some basic features every other email program I've ever used. I'd kill to be able to select some text in the orginal message, hit reply, and only the text I've selected shows up in the reply window. Outlook also puts your .sig at the top of the message, not at the bottom where it belongs.

I had to laugh at a fairly recent MS presentation about Outlook 11 where they said they were looking at what they could do to ensure that an email that had gone to-and-fro several times read correctly, with the oldest stuff at the top and the newest stuff at the bottom.

For those of us who have grown up with pre-MS email tools, we know only too well that the de-facto standard was ALWAYS to operate this way, and it is only Microsoft that tried to change things so that the newest bit was at the top. Just goes to show that they can get there in the end :)

--Philip

[bdegroodt]

Entourage has had this feature for ages (As have many other programs that aren't from MS).

[JonnoB]

Jonathan,
What is the name of that App you are referring to?

Matt

It is from a company called Vision to Reality. Here is a link (http://www.v2r.ag./) to the website. It is called Caller2Picture

[bdegroodt]

And another thing! Why don't the color coding of events from Outlook 02 Calendar come over to the PPC calendar?

[Peter Foot]

One feature I would really like to see is a thumbnails view of the contacts folder / windows addressbook. Obviously this could be brought across to the ppc version too along with caller-id support for phone edition devices - the same could apply to an incoming email or messenger conversation.

You could have a standard set of "avatars" based on category etc and then over-ride these with images where you have appropriate mugshots

Peter

[denivan]

Didn't the old Nokia Communicator allready have contact photo's ? Indeed it is strange that this feature isn't incorporated in current PIM applications. You would think that from Outlook 2000 and on, they would include this, but apparantly not....you know Jason, you shouldn't have made this post about the 'missing photo field', because now when I realise it is indeed missing, it starts to annoy me ;)

Greetz

[Jonathan1]

Not too concerned about pictures. It would be cool but *shrugs* I spent $500+ on Office XP. This is the end of the line when it comes to Office products and me. Sorry I've been bled dry over the last 10 years from Office upgrades. The only reason I've ever upgraded was better stability. With XP and Win2K as a combo I’m finally satisfied with what I have. Between Office XP Special Edition, Windows 2000 Full I just about paid a full grand for those 2 packages alone. I could have gotten a laptop for that much. :?

[Jason Dunn]

I had to laugh at a fairly recent MS presentation about Outlook 11 where they said they were looking at what they could do to ensure that an email that had gone to-and-fro several times read correctly, with the oldest stuff at the top and the newest stuff at the bottom.

Oh no! I hope this is user-configurable :evil: What a collosal waste of time to have to scroll down to the bottom on every email. I know "bottom posting" may be old-school UseNet, but it's a waste of human resources (ie: time and wrist muscles) to scroll down to the bottom. And before anyone disagrees with me, ask yourself how much fun it would be if we posted new items at the bottom of the Thoughts home page instead of the top. :lol:

[egads]

Not too concerned about pictures. It would be cool but *shrugs* I spent $500+ on Office XP. This is the end of the line when it comes to Office products and me. Sorry I've been bled dry over the last 10 years from Office upgrades. The only reason I've ever upgraded was better stability. With XP and Win2K as a combo I’m finally satisfied with what I have. Between Office XP Special Edition, Windows 2000 Full I just about played a full grand for those 2 packages alone. I could have gotten a laptop for that much. :?

I agree 100%
Think PPC will ever sync with StarOffice ? That is if StarOffice ever gets a email/organizer...

[KyleC]

While we're complaining about Outlook...

I wish
there were a better way to print address labels than merging them to Word
the "notes" section didn't support formatting (I know, I know, but formatting always looks really bad when synced)
there was an easy way to make your own fields
it could sync AOL mail :wink:
the notes catagory could be as memo pad is on Palm Desktop
Microsoft would build in Office to Windows, and any time a program needed an address book, it would retrieve the info from Outlook
and the list goes on...

But overall, I really like the fact that Outlook stores all your info in one file instead of scattering things across many files. However, it may be a bit too robust for me. :roll:

[Carlos]

I see this picture thing as a huge, unwieldy, and costly gimmick. It has no business value, and high costs.

[egads]

I had to laugh at a fairly recent MS presentation about Outlook 11 where they said they were looking at what they could do to ensure that an email that had gone to-and-fro several times read correctly, with the oldest stuff at the top and the newest stuff at the bottom.

Oh no! I hope this is user-configurable :evil: What a collosal waste of time to have to scroll down to the bottom on every email. I know "bottom posting" may be old-school UseNet, but it's a waste of human resources (ie: time and wrist muscles) to scroll down to the bottom. And before anyone disagrees with me, ask yourself how much fun it would be if we posted new items at the bottom of the Thoughts home page instead of the top. :lol:

You just put the quote on top :D
Not sure how old you are, but I NEED to see what the oldest stuff was just to remember what the email was about in the first place. I like to do this:
> quote
Reply

> quote
Reply
...

Easy to read and follow. Old school I know, but it works well for me. Heck, if I had my way, the first person who came up with HTML email's should have been tortured, and head hung on a pike so no one else would think to do so again :twisted: Don't even get me started on what I'd do to the MS people who decided it was OK for Word to be able to read my address book and have hooks to access the internet so some looser could write a macro virus and hit every on in my address book.

Again, just my age showing...

[ExtremeSIMS]

Entourage has had this feature for ages (As have many other programs that aren't from MS).

:) Another Mac user.

Syncing up with my new Toshiba e740 (smashed the screen on my Zaurus :cry: ) with PocketMac, and wishing I could carry over colors, photos, and more.

[bdegroodt]

Entourage has had this feature for ages (As have many other programs that aren't from MS).

:) Another Mac user.

Syncing up with my new Toshiba e740 (smashed the screen on my Zaurus :cry: ) with PocketMac, and wishing I could carry over colors, photos, and more.

I wish I was. Waiting to hear more from PocketMac users before I make the "switch." Also read the other day that PPC sync via iSync might be in the offing.

Also a PHP Nuke user http://www.hcmnews.com/phpnuke/html/index.php :D

[mashtim]

I see this picture thing as a huge, unwieldy, and costly gimmick. It has no business value, and high costs.


As a travelling salesman, I have to say that a picture field would have EXTREMELY high business value to me. I have 5000+ contacts in my DB right now and I can't tell you how embarrassing it is when I speak to someone on the phone and cannot remember what they look like. I would upgrade Office or pay for a stand-alone that does this in a heartbeat!!

[seanturner]

I see this picture thing as a huge, unwieldy, and costly gimmick. It has no business value, and high costs.


As a travelling salesman, I have to say that a picture field would have EXTREMELY high business value to me. I have 5000+ contacts in my DB right now and I can't tell you how embarrassing it is when I speak to someone on the phone and cannot remember what they look like. I would upgrade Office or pay for a stand-alone that does this in a heartbeat!!

Well, according to Paul Thurrot [sp?] and others it is in Office 11. However, the photos probably do not sync to the PocketPC as expented. Although, if you do have 5,000 photos, wouldn't those take up some RAM on your PPC? Also, how do you get photos of all your contacts?

[Jonathan1]

You just put the quote on top :D
Not sure how old you are, but I NEED to see what the oldest stuff was just to remember what the email was about in the first place. I like to do this:


egads. Totally agree. I need a summary as to what the person was replying to. Otherwise numerous discussions get unruly. My general rule of thumb is to remove the previous discussion or trim it down to a manageable length. With an:

&lt;Edited for length>

entry in the e-mail. But that’s me. I guess I’m old school as well. :-)
*shrugs* Doesn't really matter since I've stopped using Lookout as my e-mail client. I just don't feel safe using it. But again that's me.

[mashtim]

Sean, virtually all of those contacts are people that I have at one time or another met face-to-face. You would be surprised at how the kitsch factor works when you want someone's email address or the sort. (Most of my customers use email mainly for personal use, not business) Once they see a camera sticking out of a "Palm" (I often don't even bother any more), their interest is piqued.

And as far as how much RAM 5000 pics would take on my PPC, who cares? That's one of the reasons I bought my e740! With a 256MB SD card and a 512MB CF card in there, I have plentyof room!

But, like I said, the photo feature alone would be enough for me to upgrade Office. Looks like I'm going to be getting 11 soon!

[seanturner]

But, like I said, the photo feature alone would be enough for me to upgrade Office. Looks like I'm going to be getting 11 soon!

Sign up for Office 11 Beta 2. I don't remember where the page was though...

[bdegroodt]

But, like I said, the photo feature alone would be enough for me to upgrade Office. Looks like I'm going to be getting 11 soon!

Sign up for Office 11 Beta 2. I don't remember where the page was though...

http://www.betanews.com/article.php3?sid=1036557951

[Timothy Rapson]

Someone on PDA Buzz had taken this idea of including pictures in notes about 1 year ago. He had pictures and all. It was NOT easy. The problems were with color depth and size of the picture. Since all PPCs now come with 64k colors, that should no longer be a problem.

But the time this would all take!?


I barely use the PIMs on my PDA, but my Clie NR I have the camera right there all the time. The PIM program built-in works with pictures and I expect with the new NX70V and 200 MZ Intel ARM processor it would be very usable. My NR can include 88 by 88 (usable sized) pictures for each entry in the address book, but they must be in RAM. I think each photo takes up only 8k or so and loads quickly enough.

I found that it just takes too long to get a person's picture and address while talking to them. But, if I were absolutely determined to keep track of 1000 contacts this way, I would think a modern PDA could handle it. 5000? Is there anyone here who even uses that many plain text contacts at one time on a PDA?

[Imre]

When i first got my toshiba e740 i found it very annoying that there wasn't a possibility to add a picture to a contact. So what i did was store all the pics on compactflash and have the webpage for each contact point at the corresponding picture. Bit of work , but until there's a good alternative it'll have to do.

[sweetpete]

One little side note ... the Sony Ericsson T68i (and other models) already has the ability to display pictures with contacts.

I have a bunch of Pic's loaded so now everytime sometime in my contacts calls, it displays their picture instead of their name. It's pretty nice to "see" the person calling you and I definitely agree that it has business use for people.

I haven't used the feature in Outlook 11 yet, but I hope a new version of XTNDConnect will sync the picture field between my phone and Outlook 11 to save me the trouble :lol:

[bdegroodt]

...but I hope a new version of XTNDConnect will sync the picture field between my phone and Outlook 11 to save me the trouble :lol:

I just hope the new version of XTNDConnect just works with XP in general. The biggest dissapointment of owning the T68i is the well documented incompatibility/issues with XTNDConnect (The OOB version)and syncing. :evil:

[Pony99CA]

There are two technologies starting to come together that made me wonder why Outlook doesn't have a field for a contact photo.

If I recall correctly, my old Sharp Mobilon HC-4500 Handheld PC had an expansion pack (which was standard on the HC-4600) which allowed a photo to be stored with contacts.

If it could be done back then (1998), it could probably be done now. You'd want to use thumbnails, of course, for memory reasons.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

I'd kill just to have Outlook have some basic features every other email program I've ever used. I'd kill to be able to select some text in the orginal message, hit reply, and only the text I've selected shows up in the reply window. Outlook also puts your .sig at the top of the message, not at the bottom where it belongs.

I had to laugh at a fairly recent MS presentation about Outlook 11 where they said they were looking at what they could do to ensure that an email that had gone to-and-fro several times read correctly, with the oldest stuff at the top and the newest stuff at the bottom.

For those of us who have grown up with pre-MS email tools, we know only too well that the de-facto standard was ALWAYS to operate this way, and it is only Microsoft that tried to change things so that the newest bit was at the top. Just goes to show that they can get there in the end :)

Every E-mail client that I've used either puts the forwarded text in-line (Eudora, for example) or adds the forwarded text at the bottom (for example, AOL -- yeah, I know).

I think putting the quoted text in-line is the best way to do things. That allows you to put your text wherever you want -- at the top, bottom or interspersed.

Signatures should be done the same way. Eudora attaches a signature to the bottom of the E-mail, so if you're forwarding a bunch of text, your signature appears after all of the quoted text, not after the text you wrote at the top.

To get around that, I use stationery instead, which includes the signature I want.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

While we're complaining about Outlook...

I wish
Microsoft would build in Office to Windows, and any time a program needed an address book, it would retrieve the info from Outlook

Do you want to pay for Windows with built-in Office? Or would you expect Microsoft to just bundle it in for the same price Windows costs now? If the latter, imagine the anti-trust implications. :-)

Of course, with Outlook Express bundled with Windows now, they could use that. If Outlook was installed, Outlook should import Outlook Express' address book, and Outlook Express should have technology to read .pst files if it couldn't find its address book.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

And as far as how much RAM 5000 pics would take on my PPC, who cares? That's one of the reasons I bought my e740! With a 256MB SD card and a 512MB CF card in there, I have plentyof room!

Having those cards is great; I have a 512 MB CF card and a 128 MB SD card. Unfortunately, it won't help much. Contacts information is stored in a database that sits in the device's RAM. It does not use storage cards, so you couldn't have more than 64 MB of photos (and that's assuming no program memory :-)).

Maybe Microsoft could modify Contacts so that pictures were stored on external media, like Inbox allows attachments to be stored there, but that would require more engineering effort than just adding a field to Contacts.

Steve

[Philip Colmer]

I had to laugh at a fairly recent MS presentation about Outlook 11 where they said they were looking at what they could do to ensure that an email that had gone to-and-fro several times read correctly, with the oldest stuff at the top and the newest stuff at the bottom.

And before anyone disagrees with me, ask yourself how much fun it would be if we posted new items at the bottom of the Thoughts home page instead of the top. :lol:

Unfortunately, Jason, I don't think the comparison works very well, mainly because the Thoughts home page consists of separate news items.

A better comparison might be the forums. What you need to ask yourself is how difficult it would be to follow a thread if the newest posting was always displayed at the beginning instead of the end where it currently is ...

--Philip

[Kirkaiya]

Hey Jason -

If you want a quick-and-dirty way to add a button to your emails that will insert your Contact as a vCard format (attachment), here's a few lines of VBA I just wrote (this is the first ever VBA I've done for Outlook, so if anybody had a more elegant solution, I'd love to have it also):

Before you do the steps below, open up your contact, and save-as ".vcf" format on your harddrive, ie., "C:\Jason Dunn.vcf" or whatnot.

First - create a new blank email.
Second - From the menu on the new blank email message, goto Tools-->Macros-->Macros
Next, in the Popup box, type a name for your macro ("InsertCard", or whatever), and click on the "Create" button.

This will open up the VBA editor, and create a blank subroutine (Sub InsertCard )

Paste in the following code:

Sub InsertCard()
myMail = Application.ActiveInspector
myMail.Save

Set myAttachments = myMail.Attachments
myAttachments.Add "C:\Jason Dunn.vcf", olByValue, 1, "Jason Dunn vCard"
Set myAttachments = Nothing
End Sub

Note that you should change the path to wherever you saved it before.

Then save your VBA macro (just click on the save icon), and go back to your blank email, use the Tools-->Customize option to create a new toolbar, then select your new macro from the commands tab (under "Macros"), and drag it to your bar (you can set the icon image, or whatever, by right-clicking the icon in the toolbar)

You can test it out by clicking your new button, and it should insert the vCard as an attaachment (works for me!!).

This is horribly inelegant, since if you change your contact, you'd have to resave it to your harddrive, etc.

An obvious improvement would be to read your contact out of the contacts folder, and then attach it in vCard format, but I don't feel like exploring the Outlook OM that much today!! :-)

Kirk

[JonnoB]

An obvious improvement would be to read your contact out of the contacts folder, and then attach it in vCard format, but I don't feel like exploring the Outlook OM that much today!! :-)

Kirk

Outlook already supports automatic attachment of contact in vcf format from your contacts list using the signature property.

[Kirkaiya]

An obvious improvement would be to read your contact out of the contacts folder, and then attach it in vCard format, but I don't feel like exploring the Outlook OM that much today!! :-)

Kirk

Outlook already supports automatic attachment of contact in vcf format from your contacts list using the signature property.

Yes, but then it's ALWAYS there - Jason mentioned that he'd like the ability to simply add it at will via a button:

I also can't figure out why Outlook email messages don't have a hotkey/button/menu option for "Insert V-Card". I know you can drag/drop from your contacts folder, or attach one to every message by default, but wouldn't a button be nice? {excerpted}

I was just pointing out a quick way to add this to your outlook, so that whenever you open an Outlook item (email, appointment, whatever), you could just click the button, and have it added. The particular lines of code I put up will add the file (whatever file, even an image file, if you wanted) to whatever item you've got open, even tasks, etc.

Anyway - you're right, of course, about the signature thing.

Update - I didn't realize it when I was playing with the macro before, but Outlook (at least, Outlook 2002+) defaults to disabling any macros that are not digitially signed. You can get a "test" digital VBA signature from Micrsoft to use for your own personal projects (it's not a "real" signature, meaning you can't distribute apps with it).

Unless you change your security settings, or use the free Microsoft VBA signer, the outlook macro I detailed 2 posts above will be disabled.... (I should have checked that before I posted it).

[JonnoB]

Outlook already supports automatic attachment of contact in vcf format from your contacts list using the signature property.

Yes, but then it's ALWAYS there - Jason mentioned that he'd like the ability to simply add it at will via a button:


Well, you can create the signature, but not have it automatically added. Then just select insert signature when you want to have a vcf card. Also, you can send a security policy for your Outlook to disable the security features in OL2002.

[Kirkaiya]

Well, you can create the signature, but not have it automatically added. Then just select insert signature when you want to have a vcf card. Also, you can send a security policy for your Outlook to disable the security features in OL2002.

Oh - I just have my signature turned on for all new messages, but that's a good suggestion.

About disabling the security features - that's a rather unsafe thing to do, and the only choices for macros (which are really VBA), are disable, prompt, and enable.

Prompting means there's one more box to click every time, and disabling macro security in Outlook to allow unsigned VBA code to run would be extremely foolhardy. Quite a few people disable even the digitally-signed macros altogether (some corporate standard office XP images have the feature turned off by default).

I have mine set only to run macros from digitaly-signed trusted sources (that is, on my list of trusted sources). I have myself, of course, listed as a trusted source :wink: